Thursday, January 24, 2013

Media Angst

In general here at the blog I don’t like to talk about up-coming posts very much because I change my mind a lot, so very often what I think will be coming soon turns out to be different from what actually gets posted. However, today I’m going to talk a little about an up-coming post because it leads me to a completely different topic.

Yesterday I mentioned that I had a song for a stop-motion video, but I didn’t have an overall context to put around the song. Today when I was having lunch, when I was thinking of random middle-of-the-day things, a complete monster movie context occurred to me that fit very well around the song I had ready. It just popped into my mind all by itself, ready-made somehow.

So now I have a pretty good idea of what my next stop-motion video will be, and all that’s left to do is figure out the actual scenes to be filmed and make choices about what kind of action I want to include and practical matters like that. And, of course, then I have to buckle down and film the scenes and edit them together and record the audio tracks and put all the different elements together.

So there is still a bit left to do.

But the hard part is pretty much worked out—I have the guiding idea for the film.

I am hoping to get everything finished for next Friday. Not tomorrow, but next Friday.

The film will be called “Creatures of Doctor Tina” and it will be sort of the concluding chapter in a trilogy with two posts from a couple of years ago.

I had no idea it would be a “trilogy” when I started. I didn’t even plan on doing a second post. But this stuff somehow sort of takes on a life of its own.

In the stop-motion film, we’ll see a little bit about where the ladybug came from and what the ladybug does in the empty house.

Look, just like real studios promoting real movies, here’s a behind-the-scenes photo of a rehearsal for the up-coming stop-motion film:

In a personal way, this all has a very bizarre feeling to it. I mean, I still remember how happy I was just to draw that cartoon a couple of years ago. Then it was fun writing a little more about the ladybug.

And now I’m going back and doing a little movie about it. Back when I did that cartoon, I never could have imagined this, that this idea would be happening in so many different forms, or that I’d have the resources to bring the story to life in so many different ways.

And I suppose I should mention the title “Creatures of Doctor Tina” is a bit of a passing reference itself to the passing reference I made to “Creatures of Prometheus” in How To Shop With Beethoven.

But the music for the stop-motion film will have noconnection to the Beethoven music.

I love doing these little stop-motion movies, and I probably enjoy putting together music and story and images like this as much as anything else I do here at the blog.

But I wonder if this is a good way to spend my time.

What I mean is, when I write stuff I can take that writing to other contexts. And that goes for music, too. If I do a song, I can play the song in other contexts.

But visual things like cartoons and especially videos are pretty much their own context. They exist here at the blog and they’re available to anyone who has a computer, but they are not creations I can take with me except as what they are—computer files of various kinds. And even that depends on the file formats remaining popular. It all makes me think of my post The Persistence Of Rocks.

I feel myself becoming part of that generation that will leave behind nothing.

A song I can play on guitar or keyboard or I can give the music to a flute player and I can sing along as they play. Whatever. But a little film is what it is and that’s it.

To put this in the most extreme form—maybe even to reduce this line of thinking to something like absurdity, but nonetheless this is how I think—I mean suppose there is an afterlife. Things that I write I will still remember and take with me into the afterlife. Even songs. If there is sound in the afterlife, I will be able to sing any song I may remember. But movies and cartoons are not going to make the transition into the afterlife with me. (Presumably, that is, I guess, based on common assumptions about what an “afterlife” might be like.)

So, anyway, I’m always wondering now if making little stop-motion videos is a good use of my time. I’m wondering now if I should concentrate more completely, even more than I do now, on real writing—stories and songs.

I don’t know.

Maybe after “Creatures of Doctor Tina” I will take some time off from even thinking about film and video.

I don’t know.

At any rate, that’s the stuff that’s been on my mind lately. (But, too, I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately with the tennis going on in Australia, and my thinking may level out a little after this weekend when the Australian Open finishes up.)